Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more
One striking thing about this autumn's new books is the flood of
biographies dedicated to great dead male writers. Thomas Karlauf's
biography of Stefan George (Blessing Verlag), which is already causing
a lot of noise, is surrounded by scores of others, most of them written
by German authors. They include a biography of Leo Perutz by
Hans-Harald Müller (Zsolnay Verlag), two biographies of Heinrich von Kleist by Gerhard Schulz (C.H. Beck) and Jens Bisky (Rowohlt Berlin), one of Josef von Eichendorff by Hartwig
Schultz (Insel), a Christoph Martin Wieland biography by Michael
Zaremba (Böhlau), a biography of Wilhelm Müller, author of Schubert's song cycle
"Winterreise", by Erika von Borries (C.H. Beck), a biography of Wilhelm
Busch by Gudrun Schury (Aufbau), two biographically oriented books
about Goethe,
one of them, by Sigrid Damm (Insel Verlag), dealing with
his "last voyage," and the other by Roberto Zapperi about "Goethe und
sein Italien" (Goethe and his Italy - C.H. Beck). Rüdiger Safranski,
Germany's most successful biographer, this time takes on an entire
epoch with "Die Romantik" (Romanticism - Hanser). Then there's an
opulent book of images and texts on Gottfried Benn (edited by Holger
Hof, Klett-Cotta), while Helmuth Kiesel has written a biography of
Ernst Jünger (Siedler).
Gerhard Schulz: Kleist (C.H. Beck), Jens Bisky: Kleist (Rowohlt Berlin), Hartwig Schultz: Joseph von Eichendorff (Insel)
Big-name foreign writers whose biographies come out this autumn include
Balzac (by Johannes Willms, Diogenes), Proust (by Jean-Yves Tadie,
Suhrkamp), Melville (by Andrew Delbanco), Joseph Conrad, whose 150th birthday will issue in two biographies (by Elmar Schenkel, S. Fischer Verlag and John Stape, Marebuchverlag).
And if the series doesn't end with Halldor Gudmundsson's biography of
the Icelander Halldor Laxness (btb), my list does, if only to avoid
overtaxing my readers.
Johannes Willms: Balzac (Diogenes), Halldor Laxness (btb), Jean-Yves Tadie: Marcel Proust (Suhrkamp)
For decades, Germans have left this
terrain to English and American writers. Now, however, they seem
finally cured of their disinterest in biography. Provided, that is,
that sales correspond to publishers' expectations. But assuming they
do, and that interest in the writers' lives and conditions can be rekindled, the question remains as to why?
Gudrun Schury: Das Leben des Wilhelm Busch (Aufbau), Helmuth Kiesel: Ernst Jünger (Siedler), Hans-Harald Müller: Leo Perutz (Zsolnay)
In fact the return
of the biography has been noticeable for some time. The collapse of the
Eastern Bloc has played a role, as has flagging postmodern
euphoria, which although it turned now and then to the "biographemes"
of Roland Barthes, never sought – or even wanted – to synthesise
people's life and work into an empathetic picture.
Empathy is in
fact the key word here. Because without it, without a knowledge of
human nature, you can't write a decent biography, no matter how
impressive the archive material you've sifted through. Our view of what
people are like is forever in flux, and this is exactly what a
biography should reflect. It must speak from "today". Older biographies
often sound distant, even absurd to our ears, despite having being penned by such distinguished writers as Golo Mann and like his
"Wallenstein" having joined the canon.
Michael Zaremba: Christoph Martin Wieland (Böhlau), Erica von Borries: Wilhelm Müller (C.H. Beck), Holger Hof: Benn (Klett-Cotta)
For all the danger of
psychological short-circuits - or of psychologism pure and simple -
nothing is or could be possible without a subjective grasp.
Nevertheless it would be fatal now to appeal to a new immediacy, an
empathetic innocence. Empathy sets high standards, especially with
artists. Today's biographer has no choice but to delve into the
unavoidable, difficult connections between creative processes and
neurotic economy, of art and drives. No doubt Viennese emigrant K.R.
Eissler's Goethe biography will remain unsurpassed for its radical
commitment to Freudian psychoanalysis. The work of 1963 (German
translation in 1983) is a milestone of its genre.
Yet the
question is still crucial today: how to integrate psychoanalysis in
biographical writing without making artistic concessions? Thomas Mann's
biographer Hermann Kurzke reflected on his biographical method some
years ago in Kursbuch magazine (No. 148), confessing: "In matters of
biography I stand for an idealistic Freudianism. Insight into the
mechanism of drives doesn't serve to reduce everything high to a basic
level. On the contrary, it allows me to elucidate the conditions of
possibility of the high."
It's no coincidence that Kurzke says
this in reference to the "ascetic homosexual," because that is exactly
what he sees in his revered Thomas Mann. Mann's suppression of his
desires was "transformed into imaginary fulfilment," Kurzke writes.
"That's why I speak not of neurosis, but of asceticism, not of
suppression but of chasteness. And that's why I see in his attempt at
suppressing his desires not uptightness but a kind of freedom, and in
the sublimation of his desires not renunciation, but a feat of
cultivation far surpassing what has been sublimated." This approach was
extremely productive for Thomas Mann, as Kurzke has demonstrated in his
biography ("Das Leben als Kunstwerk", or Life as a Work of Art, C.H. Beck 1999).
If one
considers, by contrast, the two heterosexual sex-geniuses of 20th
century German literature, Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht, clearly
other patterns of explanation are called for. Both of them loved in
highly concrete terms an impressive series of remarkable women.
Manifestly, fulfilled desire and poetic productivity may also go hand
in hand.
How do things stand, then, for Stefan George and his (in)famous circle of young disciples? As the prologue to Thomas
Karlauf's extensive biography makes clear, the work examines in detail
the homosexual core of private Germany. On a visit to Vienna at 23,
Stefan George is curtly rebuffed by the 17-year-old school student Hugo
von Hofmannsthal (more), who even at that young age was surrounded by
admirers. A deep slight to George's eros, the mortification marked the
writer for a lifetime. His dubious charisma then emanated down to his
disciple and would-be Hitler-killer Claus von Stauffenberg, a very
proper family father.
The interplay of history, politics and
sexuality (or respectively homosexuality) is as enthralling as it is
delicate, the more so in that speculations abound as to whether Hitler
himself was homosexual in some repressed or perverse way. Here, within
the inner workings of their desires, subliminal connections are
revealed between men who in other respects are entirely different.
Throwing light on these is no small matter, and goes to the heart of the
specifically German male phantasm which purports to differentiate
between good and evil. From this perspective, the excitement around
this biography gives cause for thought. Does Karlauf's book really
elucidate the secrets of the group around Stefan George for today's
readers?
But before the curtain goes up on the autumn of the
biographies, one small scandal deserves mention. It happened a few
years ago, and concerned not a man but a woman – Gottfried Benn's last
lover Ursula Ziebarth. She "dared" – as many reviewers wrote in outrage
– to annex a detailed postscript of her own to a collection of Benn's
letters to her ("Hernach. Gottfried Benns Briefe an Ursula Ziebarth",
Wallstein 2001).
Some specialists on Benn have frowned upon
Ziebarth ever since. But Benn had reasons of his own to like her,
desire her, use here, and perhaps even love her for a short time. Soon
after their first date over an ice-cream, he called Ziebarth, 30 years
younger than him, his "Ponny" and "sweet little Ursula," clearly
delighted with his reawakened eros.
Yet it's curious: almost no
one was interested to discover Benn's fondness for Ziebarth.
Defensiveness predominated, and Ziebarth was treated like biographical
detritus: "Show me one example in literary history where fifty years
after a writer's death, a former lover was allowed to intersperse
authentic letters with her image of their relationship. How is it that
in the imaginary commentaries of one of Benn's surviving lovers, he can
be branded as some kind of neurotic pasha?" writes one incensed critic.
It
is a telling flaw in reasoning to say the poet can be besmirched by the
views of a headstrong woman who fails to observe the principle of "good
behaviour is better than loyalty." But the longing for the unspoiled
personality of the artist also plays a role here. It reveals the
precarious, narcissistic side of the vivid new interest in the
biographies of great prominent men.
*
The article originally appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau on September 1, 2007.
Ina Hartwig is the editor of the literature section of the Frankfurter Rundschau.
Translation: jab.